On the Far Side, There's a Boy

by Coston, Paula

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘But how are you?’

  ‘Things could be worse.’

  Her mother knew what hadn’t happened in Sri Lanka, and Martine saw the end of her parent coming, but how could they admit how bad things were? Communication was a pontoon swinging over concealment and shifting ground on either side.

  Late one morning, when Martine was chasing sleep, there was a pounding on her door. Jonas pushed into her lobby, peeling off a dripping raincoat, fleece and sweater. Pills alone didn’t work, so she was trying to stupefy herself by keeping the heating on high.

  ‘Mom is sick! Deal!’ He glared.

  There was a mottled bloom to his face, as if changing between happy and sad so often had confused it. Although he was living at Harrow Weald, he and Pearl were still together.

  Martine was flustered. ‘How’s Pearl?’

  Pearl was just as screwed up, these days about what she was doing to Jonas, whether she was now screwing him up.

  ‘You mean how’s Mom? She’s in the car.’

  Martine started. ‘You can’t leave her out there.’

  She flung on a bathrobe and swept with Jonas into the lift, not seeing that he’d shut her door behind her.

  Rain was drilling at the roads of the estate. In the back of the car, its engine idling, a swathed figure leaned towards her. Head down against the weather, Martine struggled with the door. She tried to help her out, but was gripped by a fist and yanked inside. In the driving seat, Jonas was already starting off. Struggling to climb out again, she found the grip didn’t feel like her mother’s.

  ‘What d’you think you’re playin’ at, Mar?’ Pearl accused.

  It was Pearl who reached across her and slammed the door.

  As they accelerated away, Pearl, tight-lipped, unwrapped from her disguise. Jonas kissed Pearl and dropped her off on the north side of the river, and the journey continued in near-silence. Martine slept much of the way from a kind of relief, responsibility snatched from her. By the time she and Jonas had got to Harrow Weald, she was indifferent to her kidnap.

  Entering the house in sodden slippers, she found it changed. Its associations with too much human shuttling had gone. Her mother was as stationary as Jonas could persuade her to be; room shuttling had become the role of the furniture. To stop her climbing the stairs, he’d tried it in various configurations. The dining room was for now the old woman’s bedroom, the table and chairs and sideboard, by Bill Kidmay’s graces, in store. So that Jonas could work part-time and devote himself to the patient, the latest mutt was at a neighbour’s, along with all its things.

  Martine’s mother was seated in the living room, not as brave-faced as Martine had hoped. The angina bouts had become recurrent, now striking even at rest.

  ‘Darling. Sorry.’ The woman threw her a pleading look.

  They hugged and stayed in hold.

  Martine said, ‘It should be me saying that.’

  When they disengaged, tears stained her mother’s face.

  ‘Even if they’d give me one, I couldn’t face another op.’

  ‘Then don’t have one,’ Martine said, and a piece of her fell away.

  She took in this narrowed world. An automated recliner of Bill Kidmay’s with a footrest seemed to swallow her mother, an alien craft among the feminine clutter. Once a day she took a turn with Bill Kidmay round the garden among the few scorched-looking rosebuds; twice a week he brought the dog to see her. A low cupboard by the recliner stored her mother’s laptop, pill bottles, crossword-puzzle books and the blackbird on the acorn bough, unpicked of ‘Please’, reworked and nearly done. On the cupboard top, a jug of water and a saucer with crushed pill traces. The TV remote, the phone and a handful of tissues. And on her lap, the Playstation console that had become her addiction: Apache Air Attack, Skydrift, Birds of Steel. As they talked now, some futuristic aircraft left unmanned between the walls of the Grand Canyon suddenly erupted into flame on the TV screen. Everywhere, Martine could see defeat.

  She and Jonas arranged a rota: on alternate weeks Martine moved in to Harrow, which gave him more time for Pearl and work. Martine fought down the panic for her mother, still couldn’t sleep.

  One day she found Mum with a book. ‘Bill got it in a secondhand bookshop.’

  The London Underground 1945-Now: A Post-War History. ‘Now’ was 1974. Shrivelled fingers reached for the bookmarked page and Verdon Haslett stared out, the back of his hand propping his chin, before a photo on his wall of one of his tube trains: Class 487 stock, English Electric.

  Martine’s mother thrust her the volume. ‘I thought you’d like it.’

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘What would you like then?’

  ‘You to feel better,’ said Martine, withholding the strain from her voice.

  But the woman seemed desperate to give her something, jabbing, in turn, at every knickknack crowding round her. The glass fish and Venetian bowls, the miniature gardens of cacti, vases of silk flowers, the porcelain plates on their hangers on the walls. Martine shook her head.

  ‘There!’ Her mother rose quickly and had to sit down.

  She was insistent. Martine fetched the ornament she meant. A porcelain woman with a child of unspecific gender with tousled hair, the female in the long skirt of some idealised century bending to the child over a book. Grey and the palest violet, like an elongated ghost. Cheap and populist, mass produced. Martine murmured, pretending appreciation.

  Mum claimed the woman looked like a teacher. ‘So she could be you.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Martine felt, A mother.

  Ever since she’d had the thing, her mother must have seen it as the pair of them together. Now, with a full stop looming, she’d adopted a different view.

  Martine carried it home. Too sentimental even for her mother, surely: it couldn’t have been something that she’d bought. Martine wondered where she’d filched it from. On the internet, she found it in a range named ‘A Woman’s Calling’, subtitled ‘Teacher’, but to her its motherly look overrode all else.

  She never displayed the figure. She did borrow the train book later, making a print of her father for the lobby.

  In October 2012, when Jonas was out shopping, Mum had a stroke while walking in the garden with Bill Kidmay. By November, the hospital had released her.

  One morning on Martine’s watch, her mother found she couldn’t get up. From the French windows of the dining room-cum-bedroom, rosebuds and lawn lay iced in frost.

  She could barely move; yet ‘Love you,’ she told Martine.

  And with miraculous effort, turned away. At her bedside, Martine didn’t move.

  Through the arrangements, the funeral and afterwards, Martine fumed about Jonas. He gave her the impression he felt released; his talk had turned to America, to moving there with Pearl, as if, towards the end, he’d only been hampered by her mother.

  In a flat and bleak December, Martine spent days digging through the silt of her neglected emails. In among them glinted a suggestion from her mother, dated way before she’d died.

  ‘To: MartineHaslett@hotmail.com

  Sent: 4 October 2012 18:42

  From: Bobbie@Haslettfamily.co.uk

  Subject: Bill’s niece

  Darling

  Bill comes to see me often, as you know. (Lately I’ve found him a bit clingy, just between ourselves. They talk about letting go, but to me it doesn’t feel like that, a giving in. More as if I’m reaching out somewhere more interesting, dying (!) to be adventurous in a way that Bill doesn’t seem to understand.)

  ‘Anyway Alice, your old schoolfriend, is in Australia these days, you remember. He tells me her news and I pass it on to you. But she has cousins. His eldest niece is helping with the fallout from the Haiti earthquake, another one struggling as a single mother. But he brought the middle one, Jocelyn, to see me the other day. Chatty, a bit tart.

  ‘She runs an agency for schools with international experience progr
ammes. It connects them with hosts willing to take care of the children during their exeats and holidays. Looking after a foreign student: couldn’t that be something you might do? The address is guardians@theschoolgate.co.uk. Her surname’s Teague.

  ‘I won’t mention this again. In the end, it’s up to you.

  All love as ever, Mum X’

  Martine’s mother had left her something beyond a figurine. Not the idealistic path of one niece or the rough way of the other’s, but – although it’s taken her all this time to admit it – a modest, more manageable way.

  33 Changing ends

  Friday 15 February 2013

  07:29 in the morning, and Martine’s visitor arrives today, and she must get up, but her dream of the Queen’s Hotel is still wrenching out of her like badly perforated paper. Today of all days, she doesn’t have time to mope.

  She climbs out of bed, negotiates the maternal obstacles on her floor, slings on a dressing gown. She humidifies Sancho’s cage, feeds him his water jet and crickets, knocks the bread-crumbs from the breadboard through the netting at the pigeons. Then she feeds herself and drinks strong coffee till her pulse booms. She honestly can’t identify her state.

  Matt the painter appears at eightish to help her reassemble the spare room. They take each end of heavy objects, mistiming the lifts, teasing each other. The configuration ends up as it had to, single bed, chest of drawers, bedside table, narrow desk under small window that no one can look out of unless they stand on the wooden chair and climb from that onto the desk. The paint fumes have abated, but despite the green, it’s no Enchanted Eden. Martine thinks, Enough already. Stop wanting things so perfect.

  The Amelia Earhart scarf of her mother’s, now in its frame, she also needed help with. She’s already offered it up to the lobby wall, facing that office shot of her father, doubting herself about it: How can I put Mum’s picture close to his? As if they’re still in opposition. Earlier she foresaw the hammer’s downforce, her horny nails scraping for tacks in the tray, the empty sound of knocking, the faffing about with twine on the back of the heavy frame, trying to level the picture, and couldn’t even begin.

  Now Matt coaches her through it. ‘Oop-la! ’t’s right. Down a bit. Left a bit. Right a bit. Up a bit. Bish bosh. Looks good.’

  ‘You’ve been a basinful of brilliant.’ Martine pays him more than they agreed and braces herself against the pang now that he’s leaving her, his tic and more, probably, shying him away from kissing her, in her night things, on one cheek.

  Another boy that she may not hear from again. When he’s gone she notices beyond the glass a lipstick smear on the scarf. Her black eyes squint through her varifocals. The tint is her mother’s colour, not hers. She needs it closer than behind glass.

  An ineffectual winter’s day, cold, grey, a bit damp and lifeless. She scours the local shops for a scented plant, buys enough food for breakfast for two till Sunday and comes back to research events for the weekend, things her guest might enjoy.

  She reads her texts and emails. Jocelyn Teague has had to forward her the directions to the school again because Martine seems, as if deliberately, to have lost them. From her laptop, she sends them to her printer by the breadbin.

  Jonas has messaged, ‘Go, Martine.’

  Bernard says, ‘Good luck girl.’

  Claire says, ‘Dogs send their very best wishes,’ tongue in cheek.

  Pearl snarls, ‘Ooh-er, panic, gather round. What is it with you women?’, a sarcastic ‘No thanks’ to Martine’s anxious soup supper invitation the night before.

  ‘You women,’ Martine notes. She remembers Pearl’s old text, two weeks since: ‘Mar, remember what the feminine side did to me,’ Pearl distancing herself from the very gender she has chosen. Something in Martine shifts, rising up to defend the sisterhood, but she can’t antagonise the already unstable Pearl. Pearl will fly with Jonas to the States soon. Martine takes a moment to worry for them.

  She showers, walks through a cloud of Eau Fraiche, then dresses in the floral smock over leggings that have been hanging pressed in her wardrobe for three days: a maternal look, she hopes. Recalling her mother’s style gave her no help in that direction. Photos of Mum marching for Women’s Lib in the 60s, and, with Martine, for nuclear disarmament in the 70s show her unvaryingly in plain skirts and dresses – keeping on her bra. It was soon after Jonas arrived, she remembers, that the older woman took to wearing trousers.

  Last, a little makeup, fingers through her mutinous hair. Martine gives the kitchen a final sweep with the dustpan. She groans to her feet, and an adage patches together in her head, A new broom gathers old moss, welding the past and the hoped-for future.

  In the grey day, she descends at Kennington to the Northern line. Against the smutty draught she wraps her scarf, pulls her cap over her eyes. Beyond the platform rats dodge the rails, recalling a sparrow under a train that she once puzzled over. She boards her ride, which rattles her to Finchley Central, the passengers moving zombie-like on and off, while she remembers another day when the travelling throng smiled at her in her fruit dress as if her sense of occasion was plain. She doesn’t like the tube so much these days, no longer sharing its thundering sense of the definite. Today she can’t tell if she’s tensed in anticipation or against more disappointment. A branch line takes her to Mill Hill East. She exits the station and searches for the bus stop.

  The bus takes her on for nearly a mile to a stop near the gates, the end of the long school drive. A plaque on a lion’s-head pillar names the far collection of grand buildings as Addis Hall, the school. On foot the gravel approach seems long, a deserted sports field to the left, rows of winter-grizzled vegetables to the right. Mercedes and four-by-fours swish past her into the world with their gesticulating charges in the back. She’s a bit late. Picking up her pace, she tells herself, Expect nothing.

  On the shallow steps of the main porch, teenagers cluster with their bags as if still hoping to be picked for a team. A woman in a suit, her hair scraped into a bun, stalks round them with a clipboard, keeping them corraled. Some boys and girls are fiddling with papers, possibly photos of their guardians-to-be. Martine feels at a disadvantage: she has no aid with her to recognise her match.

  She slows and scans their faces, especially the dark ones. The stream of cars has dried up for a while. The children shriek with laughter, manhandling each other but especially one among them, snatching at a paper, prodding it and hooting, gesturing towards Martine. It could either be harmless teasing or something more aggressive.

  From their pointing, she can tell that their target is her charge.

  ‘You do not have a car?’ the target’s accented voice calls out, either desperate or insolent. ‘But all this luggage!’ it objects.

  Martine doubletakes. My first black mark: no luxury pickup.

  ‘We’ll manage somehow. Lovely to meet you.’ She smiles and takes the steps, trying to look unfazed.

  Things happen fast, introductions, an exchange of details with the Housemistress and paperwork in the hall, the actual handover. Martine registers an elfin haircut, with random tufts dyed red. An angular, dark jawline. Black jeans trailing on the ground, and a T-shirt printed with a corset, its strings half-severed by bloodstained scissors. They’re moving off now. She can’t feel anything. This is her last chance to refuse her charge.

  * * *

  Anupama

  In an experiment, Anupama has hung squares of differently coloured fabrics along the northern fence of her garden, each labelled with a number, date and time. She’s had no texts from Mohan for the last five days. In their pattern of communication, she behaves and he still treats her like his mother.

  She texts Upeksha. ‘Could Kanchana most kindly sell my sarees?’

  Upeksha’s friend might help her start her fund, she’s thinking. But it’ll need to be a huge amount for this solution to her barrister training.

  Eventually the phone winks back, ‘Don’t be foolish.’

  ‘Oh, Auntie-Uncle M
oon,’ she exclaims, seeing the lines behind Upeksha’s lines. Upeksha doesn’t know about her English game plan yet, yet the woman’s already fazed. According to her sister Upeksha, it’s Anupama’s job to make sure that they meet at festivals and celebrations, stay bound together; to advise when things go wrong; to be hospitable and generous to Upeksha’s and Jayamal’s children; but never ever to need family help herself. Long ago, Anupama championed Upeksha over that bother with her boss at Victoria’s Secret, the man who nonetheless became Upeksha’s husband. In the older sister’s eyes, that set the seal on Anupama’s maternal function. Forget that even today, Anupama still mourns a mother herself.

  Anupama taps out, ‘I am most happy in trousers. Sometimes skirts. Sarees for a few occasions merely.’

  There’s a long silence, then she reads, ‘Sarees flatter you the most.’

  ‘That is nonsense, Moon, you know,’ Anupama huffs.

  Despite having children, Upeksha has stayed petite and trim, but over the years the childless Anupama has swollen at the base like an unpicked gourd.

  All their wedded life, Asiri has also preferred Anupama in sarees. He’s lavished them on her like payments for being domesticated, intelligent, well read, devout, attentive to his mother and extra-responsive in copulation – although her cooking is a write-off. She wonders now if her harpings-on about a career, her notes of websites that he’d like, the books borrowed for him from the library, the starching and ironing of his shirts, her hand on the nape of his neck at every mealtime, have been such a different payment, such a different load, to him.

  Ultraviolet breaks down the chemical bonds of each swatch in the garden differently: that much, Anupama has established. She’s enjoying this activity: since revealing the truth to Asiri, she’s bursting with curiosity and energy.

  ‘However,’ she confides to the absent moon, ‘it is still hard to say which sarees will fade the fastest. All seem unpredictable except yellow and white. I think that I shall keep only those.’ She says, ‘Selling all but those two sarees may return me to myself. White will suit my devotions; yellow, as you know, Moon, symbolises liberation from extremes.’